We The People, Through Our Government

It is not the job of a company to provide benefits for society or health care or sick days or anything else. It’s the job of a company to make a profit for its owners and in the process of doing so, it will create things like jobs, taxes, health care for workers, value for its customers, and other such things that are beneficial to society.

And I agree with him 100%. I’ll go even further. Wal-Mart is not “bad” because it pays low wages or skimps on providing health care. If they did that, Target could charge lower prices and customer might go to Target instead. They’re just doing their job, as WE, the people, through our government, define it through our laws.
So whose job IS it to provide for higher wages and health care? It is OUR job – the people – through OUR laws and regulations. WE are the ones who have dropped the ball on higher wages and health care. WE tell companies what to do – or the system doesn’t work. If WE, through our government, require ALL companies to pay higher wages and provide health care that levels the playing field for Wal-Mart’s competition with Target.
Here is where I differ with Hawkins. Hawkins writes,

…the government shouldn’t get involved with things like what sort of health care a company is providing, sick days, or the minimum wage…

This is the standard Libertarian view – keep the people (government) out of the decisions. But I say that is exactly where the people, through our government SHOULD get involved! We need to keep that playing field level. Companies MUST work to provide the highest profits. Therefore WE must set a playing field that provides the greatest benefit to US from this system. WE must level that playing field on which the companies compete. We MUST tell them to pay higher wages or the system doesn’t benefit us. WE have fallen down on the job, not the companies, by not doing OUR part, through our government, which is to set the minimum wages and benefits at a level that is high enough. And that is why wealth is concentrating at the top and the rest of us are working longer hours for fewer benefits.
Hawkins writes that people can always quit and get a better job elsewhere. But there is a problem with that approach, and we have seen the problem play itself out over and over throughout history. There are more people in the world than jobs, so without our intervention wages would necessarily sink to the lowest level to sustain the necessary employees – and the rest starve. Of course, in a consumer economy the companies would be drying up long before that because the consumers won’t have money to spend. We have learned from history that if we, acting through our government, “stay out of it,” it is a formula for worldwide poverty – a race to the bottom. Historically it is the periods of greatest involvement that have been the periods of greatest economic growth. This is because in a consumer economy policies that provide greater disposable income to the consumers grow the economy. Duh!
The system that Hawkins admires is ENTIRELY a creation of government – of us. We defined what a corporation IS. We give the owners limited liability so they can take risks without losing everything. (Imagine if buying a share of stock meant that you could become a defendant in a lawsuit.) We set up the infrastructure of the internet, and the roads, etc. upon which the companies conduct commerce… And now we need to give ourselves a raise and health care, and maybe longer vacations and shorter workweeks.

4 thoughts on “We The People, Through Our Government”

I Agree entirely with the post, though you’re being too soft on hawking. He clearly doesn’t really believe people can just ‘quit there job and find a better one’. Ever here of references? What kind of job does he think you can get if you quit every two months because an employer pulls some shifty crap on you.
In reality, people like Hawking don’t care. They make up a bunch of BS reasons why they don’t have to care, but deep down they don’t believe in a single one of them. These are the same people who scream “RAISING THE MINUMUM WAGE INCREASES POVERTY!!!!!” without so much of as a correlative relationship being shown between unemployment and increases in the minimum wage. These people make shit up to support their ideology, if you can really call greed an ideology.

It’s all part of pushing society back to the good old days of boom and bust before any social reforms were made to try to get the terrible conditions for workers under control, isn’t it? Go read Dickens for some hair-raising insight, although the goal seems to be to go even pre-Dickens.
Businesses will pay for health care, sick leave, etc. when they have to compete for employees and other businesses are providing those things. Some businesses have enough sense to realize that a good labor force is hard to find and worth making happy, especially if they manage to keep their noses out of current ideology. What seems to be happening is the country being reduced to total poverty and total inability to provide jobs when the would-be customers can no longer afford to buy anything — at which point the corporations doing this will move on like locusts to destroy other countries.

I went over there and created an account to get someone to defend this statement:
“If people are unhappy with what they’re getting paid… they’re not chained to their desk. They can try to get a job elsewhere.”
So far, I’m not hearing anything but platitudes. Why is it so hard to get a reasoned debate with these people?
Even if you buy 4.5% unemployment (and I don’t), that’s seven odd million people who “tried” to get a job and failed… and I lay odds MOST of those didn’t quit just because they thought they could get slightly better benefits somewhere else.
Soullite’s point is excellent, too: who’s gonna hire someone who they think is just going to jump when they think they can do better?

I am so sick of this capitalistic garbage. If it isn’t the responsibility of the employer or the government to provide these services and the company neglects to pay enough for an individual to pay for these… then you have absolutely no one to blame other than yourself when the answer is labor unions. Yes, the big bad boogie man! The, “They have out lived their usefullness and are now obstructing productivity. Companies are benevolent and don’t need unions to get between them and their employees.” Remember that line of resoning? About the same time as Regean and his supply side economics. The truth is, it was only the fear of unions that made companies care about taking care of their employees. Destroy the unions and there will be no need to pander to the employees anymore.
As far as loyalty… the employers made it clear that their loyalty to the workers is paycheck to paycheck. Are they surprised if they get the same loyalty back? If they are, then they are stupider than I thought… which can’t be easy.